She may have been the most underrated pop artist of the ‘80s.
True: the singer-songwriter-guitarist and her dynamite, fist-tight band did garner a Warner Brothers label deal, substantial critical acclaim, decent-ish commercial success and an '80s-appropriate measure of fame: theirs was the 11th music video (for “When Things Go Wrong”) ever played on MTV. Yet, much as Milwaukee's best band of that era, the Oil Tasters, was eclipsed by the good-but-not-as-good Violent Femmes and BoDeans, Boston’s brilliant Robin Lane & the Chartbusters (RL&CBs) were overtaken by both a very good local group (The Cars) and a lousy one (that city's namesake band) that both “went international” with a vengeance.
Lane did accrue admirers from far outside Beantown and from cities large and small: I signed on at 18 from Appleton, Wisconsin. But the big beyond-Boston breakthrough never came. This was due largely to sexism, in the form of both intolerance for her tour-complicating pregnancy (a career killer, then, for up-and-coming women artists; more on this shortly) and her resistance to being pinned down. David Bowie was permitted to forge a career through constant self-transformation; Ms. Lane, not so much. Robin's restless muse, her contagious enthusiasm for musical exploration—songbird-beautiful folk, to nearly full-bore punk, to New-Wave-tinged rock, to shimmering “alt-jangle” (the Chartbusters' specialty)—was part and parcel of her songs' and her own substantial charm … unless you were a male reviewer, manager, agent or booker who demanded that “his” women artists be easily categorizable and marketable, i.e. contained.
As for the pregnancy part: in Chartbusters drummer Tim Jackson's fine documentary When Things Go Wrong: Robin Lane's Story (2014), the band's then-manager Mike Lembo reflects, “It was bad timing, [Lane’s] having a baby in the middle of developing a career. Unfortunately, Robin started [the band] when she was a little bit long in the tooth. The problem is that when you're working with a woman, and they want to have kids, well, they'd better either wait until they're a huge success, or else adopt. If you're [already] selling millions of records and selling a lot of tickets, fine; take a year or two off … or, get a nanny or somebody.” And that's from an ally.
Already Like a Pro
Never back then, nor since, has Lane released a song that's less than strong; the majority far surpass that descriptor. The day she hit the scene, she already wrote, sang and played like a pro, for she was, if not “long in the tooth,” then no callow youth: 32 at the time of the Chartbusters' eponymous debut-album's release, with a decade-plus of writing and singing behind her. No, it wasn't she who needed to mature; it was our paternalistic culture.
To an extent—Hillary Clinton's 2016 electoral “loss” notwithstanding—America has matured on gender and so now may be ready for the best release of our current Plague Days, indeed of 2020: Lane's fifth full solo album and her first since '03, Instant Album.
The restless muse of old returns, if tempered; punker-Robin, for now at least, has retired. But all her other preferred genres remain in full swing, along with a few that I for one hadn't heard from her before: wee-hours cool-jazz, late-'60s psychedelia, cowgirl/Western, Bacharach-style piano-pop and even laid-back slacker-rap. As the minimalist first-person liner notes for the album's advance press copy winsomely (if unnecessarily) point out, “My Instant Album has all sorts of songs.” So, to y'all fellas out there demanding “Will the real Robin Lane please stand up?”, her reply remains “We have.”
Also still on display is the playful, quirky humor of the woman who, with a cheery, cheeky wink, once sang “I'm just an idiot / Over you / When I see you, a holocaust / Goes off in here” backed by an angelic “Aaaah, aaaah” choir-of-Robins (from “Idiot,” cowritten with Jackson, off the band's spectacular sophomore effort, 1981's Imitation Life). Consider the decades-in-the-making Instant Album's tongue-in-cheek title, not to mention the goofily infectious, in-the-round improv-incantation “Please Like Me” (“Ya gotta like me / I need to be loved / Don't talk about me behind my back / Don't say I'm crazy / Just like me, like me, like me!!”).
As for her characteristically hella-memorable pop hooks—riffs, chord progressions, choruses and repeats you couldn't deny if you wanted to (but why would you?)—Lane lays 'em on in doses as healthy as ever. Regardless of genre, “the catchy factor” here is through the roof: listen twice, and the songs are with you for life.
Emotional Generosity
Most crucially, this remains the Robin Lane about whom my colleague pop-music-critic Brett Milano perceptively wrote in his liner-notes essay for 2019's 3-disc RL&CBs compilation Many Years Ago (my emphases here): “What comes through strongest in Lane's songwriting is the emotional generosity, whether it's a yearning love song or one of the many ('Don't Cry,' 'When Things Go Wrong,' 'It'll Only Hurt a Little While') that offer solace to troubled friends.”
He goes on to cite Lane's self-described “Christian phase,” which commenced at the cusp of her fame. “The Christians I hung out with,” she notes with a grin in Jackson's documentary, “were the kind that didn't shave their legs, had hairy armpits, drank a lot of tequila and smoked a lot of pot.” This tribe—whose grounding was spiritual-humanist rather than doctrinaire— embraced Jesus' radical message of unconditional love, which greatly inspired and informed Robin's work. Her aim wasn't and isn't to judge, but to (if rather punkily) comfort and console.
And it worked—as I and Lord-knows-how-many other '80s young'uns can attest. In our times of struggle, those songs and the way she sang them truly helped. And still do.
That “Christian phase” may be long over, but Lane “keeps the faith” every time she writes … or takes the mic. You see, I'd go Milano one further: her “emotional generosity” comes through—here on Instant Album as much as ever—not just in Robin's songwriting, but also in her baldly, boldly transparent vocals. Back then, in “I Don't Wanna Know,” she confided in a light-speed burst, “Sometimes I just can't stand / What I'm feeling inside / But other times I feel so good / I just cry, cry, cry-cry-cry!” (Note the effectively plain-spoken use not of any “Hey, look at me!” $10 words but of a $2 monosyllable-word sung five fervent times.)
The self-same vulnerable emoting is evident throughout Instant Album. Whether arena-rockin', rockin' the cradle with a lullaby or, most often, somewhere in between, she invests each syllable with the entirety of her authentic, guileless, wide-open heart. To listen to Lane is to hear an all-revealing, all-giving friend.
Full disclosure: We've lately become actual friends—as well as collaborators, beginning with “Chip Off the Block,” a song (and music-video) that scathingly indicts both one uber-asshole of a President and his likewise heinous father and kids:
While I’m not objective about Robin, it was my objective admiration for her work—and example—that prompted me to reach out to her in the first place. Plus, the proof is in the pudding, not the pal-hood; had we never connected, this review would be no less positive.
Shadow Retrospective
Following on the heels of the aforementioned RL&CBs retrospective, Robin's latest solo record constitutes a kind of shadow-retrospective. She did score some early hits (her eponymous debut's lead-off track “When Things Go Wrong” being the biggest), but you won't find those on Instant Album; rather, here are 16 previously unreleased “orphan songs” from the past 35 years. Given Lane's longtime empathy and advocacy for homeless people (“Oh, the empty-hands / Reaching out to me / The dead and dying / [Who] walk the streets alone,” as she sang in “Rather Be Blind”), it's fitting, perhaps even symbolic, that she has managed to house, together, so many previously homeless songs.
Fully one-fourth of the tracks originated from a poetry workshop Robin taught in 1997 at the girls' summer sleep-away Camp Runoia in Maine. “Eleven-to-13-year-old girls wrote the lyrics,” she explains, “which I edited, more or less. Then I took them home, wrote the music and recorded them.” One of these four songs—the endearingly sweet-sad “Leaving You”—is perhaps my favorite Instant Album track (if not its best track and oughta-be single; we'll get to that). A swift, minor-key lament about a summer separation from one's bestie, this winsomely bittersweet heart-tugger succinctly captures the earnest innocence of puberty and early adolescence. Lane's octave-plus vocal jumps and dips come across not as showy, but as girlishly precocious: they're effective, not affected. Moreover, the professional chops of the musicians expand the piece's scope: it winds up applying to any unwanted separation, at any and every age. The song's bopping pace and the repeated lyric “Where does the time go?” remind us that all, finally, is fleeting: early friendships; childhood; life itself. Yaeko Miranda's weeping violin elegantly underlines Lane's every regret as, over the course of four minutes, the latter sings the unadorned declaration “You're my best friend” four times—each iteration more heartbreaking than the last.
The other three “summer-camp-ositions” work well, too: none comes across as amateurish or juvenile, lyrically or otherwise, as Lane brings to youthful words the sense and sensibility of a musical lifer. Most striking is the in-your-face Beatles homage “Special to Me.” If you've ever wanted to hear how the Fab Four would have sounded had Robin Lane fronted 'em, here's your chance. Combine Paul's bouncy bass from George's “Taxman” with George's psychedelic guitar and sitar from John's “Tomorrow Never Knows”; add Ringo's trademark high-hat-swing; tap it all off with a dreamy pair of Fab-ulously harmonizing vocal parts; and, Presto!—one long-missing, newly discovered Revolver track. Lennon-ish lines like “We never leave each other alone / But we just can't be togeth-uh” seal the deal. Hell, the thing even ends with backward-vocal-tracking and a fade-out / fade-back-in-and-back-out. All in all, it's quite “gear” and so spot-on, it probably should be credited “Harrison / Lane / Lennon / McCartney.”
Strangely, the doubled vocal here calls to mind less two Fabs than a pair o' Phairs. In '80s Chicago, Liz P., like many of the best female alt-poppers to emerge a decade later, likely grew up groovin' to Rockin' Robin, perhaps even incorporating a bit of her sound. Veteran singers, I've noted, sometimes wind up, in time, sounding a bit like artists they've influenced. Call it (with apologies to John) not-so-instant karma, here on Instant Album. It seems only phair.
Rounding out Robin's Runoia Reunion: a pair of pet-tributes. The plaintive album-closer “Casey Bye Bye” is a lovely, slide-guitar-imbued eulogy for a dog who was, for 12 treasured years, “like a sister”: “Why'd she leave / Knowing how she loved me? / Why, oh why, oh why oh / Why, Casey? Why did you die?” Balancing out this eulogy is the jaunty “Kitty Kat,” performed with the too-cool-for-school jazz combo 4-Piece Suit (of HBO's Sex and the City). The unnamed feline is very much alive and the apple of Lane's eye. “Even if I have to change your litter box,” Robin purrs, “And even if your cat food smells / I love you / I think you can tell.” To express her delight, Lane aims for and hits higher notes during the song's scat section than I've heard from her before. The finger-snappin’, Angelo-Badalementi-ish groove wouldn't be out of place behind the flirtatiously feline dance of bad-girl “Audrey Horne” on Twin Peaks.
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Lyrically Playful
Lane also “dons the Suit” for the lazy, laid-back back-alley saunter of “Banana” (lyrics by the combo's Sean Wolf Wortis), which finds Lane at both her most playful and her sexiest. “One night when the air is crisp,” she coyly coos, “And the moon is like shiny marble / I'm gonna slip inside your cereal bowl / With all the right intentions—and a plan: / I'm gonna be your banana.” By the time of the groovin' slow-fade-out and Lane's build to “I’ve got to be your banana,” there's no doubt she'll fulfill those “intentions” and make good on her “plan.”
“From a Goddess to a Doormat” is an ascending-chords-driven, Bacharachian voice-and-piano paean in 6/8 time, complete with Lane's Hal-David-worthy lyrics: “Piece by piece, [I] relinquished / What I'd never give in a day / Only to find I can't find myself. / How did love slip away?” Thanks in large part to Rich Entel's exquisite piano playing, it sounds just like '63; in Ms. Warwick's absence, Robin channels her inner Dionne, right down to the “La-la-la, lalalalala / Na-na-na, nanananana” outro. I didn't know Robin had it in her—though, given her storied versatility and (thanks to her father, pianist Ken Lane) childhood exposure to '60s torch singers: no great surprise. Sneak-in a muted trumpet, and the listener may well be pulled through a time warp, straight into Burt's snazzy abode.
An antidote to the heartbreak and hurt of “Goddess” comes in the form of both “Not So Bad” and “It All Makes Sense.” About the former, a hopeful ballad soulfully imparted to a longed-for onetime (and possibly future) lover, Robin confided to me, “I don't know why I wrote this one. A fantasy of some kind,” thereby casting a bittersweet patina over the latest lusciously lilting Lane love song. The late, great Johnny Cunningham fiddles with down-home élan over upbeat Western folk riffs, foregrounded by a double-lead-vocal: Kelly Knapp (The Bristols; The Darlings) and Lane, harmonizing from first word to last. And those words are typically insightful: “There's a way through the armor / That lifts us up / To the highest country / The nearest horizon … You resisted, but / It might not be so bad at all.” “Armor that lifts us up” is a classic Lane image: paradoxically, that which protects each of us—as an individual; within a couple—can also weigh us down. In time, she says, we must remove that armor and cast it aside, if we're to reach higher ground.
At first blush, the gentle folk-pop “It All Makes Sense” appears to be mining similar I-need-my-man-back turf. There's that sing-along chorus: “I let it slip away, 'cuz I didn't take care / But I got it back again, I'm gonna love it every day / Every day is a struggle, and I'm gonna break through / 'Cuz it all makes sense now, with me and you.” But Robin has disclosed to me another meaning: “The 'you' is the belief in me. So, 'me and you' is me plus the belief in me.” This reframes the confessional, apologetic song's pledge of utter, lifelong dependence as, instead, a statement of self-empowerment.
Lane’s lyrics, more effectively than any self-help book (and far more entertainingly!), have long shown an astute, even therapeutic understanding of human behavior; were I a Dean, I'd grant her an honorary Psych degree—in a Harvard second. Consider Verse 2 of “When Things Go Wrong”—“Don't keep emotions inside yourself / They're hard to face, but you must try.” Then, consider a colleague's contemporaneous, ghastly advice: “Don't cry out loud / Just keep it inside / Learn how to hide your feelings” (Melissa Manchester, 1978)—in other words, suppress your way into depression and, eventually, a malignant tumor. Sounds like someone needs to embrace the “belief in me” version of the word “you.”
Uplifting Brilliance
Most everything one needs to know about the heartbreaking yet uplifting brilliance of “Benjamin” can be gleaned from the track itself. Suffice it to say of this, the album's oldest song ('69; finally recorded four years ago), is that here Robin positively hands her heart to the baby she put up for adoption. For once, I'd rather not describe the music, nor quote from the peerless lyrics; I simply advise you to give the song a listen—or, better yet, give a look-listen to Lane’s single-take solo performance on Jackson's When Things Go Wrong doc. You'll be moved, smitten, warmed and inspired—all in two minutes' time.
Long a writer-singer of pithy, pointed, potent protest songs (“Rather Be Blind,” “I Don't Wanna Know,” the #MeToo-anticipative “Take Back the Night”), Lane here offers three. “Gaps in Justice,” cowritten and performed with her students at a Trap Rock Peace Center songwriting workshop, deftly details the way five people—a defendant convicted and long imprisoned due to mistaken identity; a minor-offender placed in solitary for being Queer; a rape survivor; and a lesbian couple—are subjected to “justice by degrees.” The degree of justice one receives is, she shows, dependent less on relative innocence/guilt than on race, sex, sexual orientation and station/means. The song's prettily poignant, bare-bones arrangement pushes the lyrics and, thus, those lost lives to the forefront where they belong.
“Military Man,” written and recorded during the Reagan years, takes on that era's largely rah-rah reaction to U.S. interference in Central America. Releasing it now is both gutsy and necessary, given the nearly, uh, uniform (Sorry!) knee-jerk consensus “Support the troops!” (Shouldn't that support really depend on what the troops are doing? And how? And why? And to whom?) The number of white service members who belong to or sympathize with hate groups, though of course comprising a minority of the total, is—per the Southern Poverty Law Center nonetheless alarmingly high, and rising. Hence, in-character lyrics like “If you need protection … that'll depend on the color of your skin / … Call me, I'll deliver / Send you up the river” ring frighteningly timely and true.
Chartbuster Scott Baerenwald follows Captain Lane into her battle-for-peace via his usual deft bass playing, as well as by writing and singing the uncomfortably apt second verse: “When I was a boy, I didn't play ball / I took my tin soldiers and melted them all / Made my first bullet from the slag they left / My imagination took care of the rest.” To its credit, though the song's lyrics offer no excuse, they provide a sympathetic explanation: in this soldier's childhood, his mama—alarmed by her gun-toting husband—“left one night when the house was still / [And] left a hole that I can’t fill.” In today's world, the chorus' oft-repeated line “Way down below Mexico” serves as a chilling reminder of the fraught flight that myriad families make from political persecution, drug-cartel recriminations and the like … only to be split up and caged by a President worse, even, than Ronnie.
The music here is a slouching half-march, and the lyrics are half-sung, half-rapped—in the style of Beck's five-years-later Gen-X lament, “Loser”—in a weary minor key. At the tail end comes a nice surprise, as the song's 45-second, major-key instrumental coda dares to hold out hope for and envision a better life. Yes, Robin still dares to, per John Lennon, imagine there are “no countries, nothing to kill and die for.”
"Something's Wrong” on the home front too, as the song thus titled makes abundantly clear—over a resigned pop-blues groove—via more in-character chronicling. “Standing in this welfare line again,” sings Lane, hauntingly, “With my baby in my arms / Got another [kid] who's supposed to be in school / Maybe he's out on the streets with a dealer / Figuring out a way to beat the system / That's keeping his mother on her back.” There's a fine short story embedded herein, if Robin ever cares to write it—though this “fiction” is, sad to say, all too true.
A solution to everything against which she has protested lies in the chiming, reverentially upbeat RFK-tribute “City of Lights.” Or does it, given what happened to Bobby? After all, “They didn’t want him to live,” and they got their wish. But, no: as the song goes on to say, the younger Kennedy's “single-minded dedication to a cause: / Helping those in need” is one that we, the women and men he inspired, now carry in his stead and his honor, even amid “fires that rage through the streets / Bearing the name of the one who could have changed things” and now “looks down from the City of Lights.” This shimmering companion piece to Dick Holler's and Dion's “Abraham, Martin and John” ('68) is a standout, even among 63 minutes' worth of 'em, though, given its gravity—it's not a song that would ever be a chart-busting summer single.
Passport to Paradise
There are two of those here, actually, and in a fair world, you'd be hearing both on the radio by next June. The ebullient, irresistible “Passport to Paradise” is the more pure-pop of the two and, thus, better-suited to hit-dom. “Let the one who loves you be your / Passport to paradise,” recommends Robin. “Feel his arms around you, he's a / Passport to paradise.” She's in full-on emotional-generosity mode here: if you see “yourself growing bitter,” advises the songwriter, “Take this time to consider: / Let the one who loves you … (etc.).”
If that sounds like a contradiction to “It All Makes Sense”—appearing, as it does, to tie happiness not to oneself but to another—well: yeah, it kind of is, but that's the nature of love. Your beloved can, passport-like, take you to great places you've never been. That said, another interpretation emerges from Robin's explanation of the song's origin: “I was talking about Jesus: He loves me, so he's my passport. Kinda corny, but no, I wasn't relying on some silly man; only on a Spirit of Love.” Either way, Lane advises placing one's trust not in “the one whom you love” but in “the one who loves you.” For many, that's a huge step in the right direction.
The last track I'll tackle is the album's first, and its most timely: the hooky “It's Your World.” For starters: Lane-iacs, keep your ears open for a tasty li'l afikoman, as she cleverly sneaks the title of an early-Robin classic into the lyrics. More substantively, though, the song is stunningly clairvoyant…
In my 5/29/20 Shepherd Express review of X the band's Alphabetland, I wrote of the album's spooky “20/20 2020-vision”—about how songs written in '19 proved prescient regarding our current pandemic. Now, consider Lane's spookily predictive latest:
"Stuck in your ivory tower / Is this the year of the plague? / Can’t get away from here … / You're no different from the rest of us / When the hammer falls … you find yourself remembering another time … / You’d rather be dead … / People used to come to you / Now, nobody's there for you when the day is through / Standing on the outside, looking in."
No need to explicate the relevance to COVID-19 and the quarantine it necessitates. Directed at a formerly high-status someone who's now in seriously deep shit, the song is downright prophetic—like much of the work of other tapped-in songwriters over the years, including (to my mind) Bob Dylan, Neil Young, George Harrison, Lennon & McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, X's Exene Cervenka & John Doe, Ani Difranco, Shawn Colvin, Kurt Cobain, Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker & Carrie Brownstein, Lissie Maurus …
… oh, and Aimee Mann, whom Robin sounds like here. No: vice versa, given that Lane's recording career kicked off a decade before Mann's, via the former's indispensable backup vocal on the Neil Young classic “Round and Round” (‘69). Lane also has the greater stylistic range: both women sing beautifully, but Aimee never really rocks out—coming closest on “Momentum” off her superb Magnolia soundtrack (‘99).
Oddly, another Magnolia Mann-track, “Deathly,” kicks off in a way extremely similar to “It's Your World.” These unconscious echoes one way or the other (Lane's song in this case having preceded Mann's) are often a function of the fact that every good pop melodist is also a de-facto pop scholar who carries, deep within her/his brain, tens of thousands of riffs, chords, changes and arrangements. (Other times, of course, such similarities are purely coincidental.)
At any rate, the arresting a-capella opening of “It's Your World,” and thus of Instant Album, establishes the song's stridently sassy, borderline-"Fuck you” vocals, with melody and arrangement to match, all conspiring toward confrontation. “It's your world,” Robin repeats again and again to The Fallen One (It's hard right now not to picture Trump)—and to herself … and, hell, to us all. Then comes the key, concluding, question: “What're you gonna do about it?”
Robin, for one, is gonna write about it, and sing about it, and play guitar about it, and continue to heal “your world,” one injured party at a time, via her songwriting-workshop project for trauma survivors, Songbird Sings, Inc. Our own gonna-do's? They're up to us.
As Robin, in punkier days, scream-sang: “I don't want to live an imitation life!” Damned if she since hasn't made good on that for more than half a century. Her new indie release may not bust the charts, but “your world” will be a better place in an instant, if Instant Album is in it.
To order Instant Album on CD, click here.
